Lin Wei, 27, one of a handful of male sixth-grade teachers at a primary school here, has made a habit of telling stories about warlords who threw witches into rivers and soldiers who outsmarted Japanese troops. “Men have special duties,” he said. “They have to be brave, protect women and take responsibility for wrongdoing.”

n Zhengzhou, a city on the Yellow River, schools have asked boys to sign petitions pledging to act like “real men.” In Shanghai, principals are trying boys-only classes with courses like martial arts, computer repair and physics. In Hangzhou, in eastern China, educators have started a summer camp called “West Point Boys,” complete with taekwondo classes and the motto, “We bring out the men in boys.”

In a place I call Gendertopia, where policy is based on scientific research indicating that there are male and female gendered learning styles, there's a plan for 2 high schools, both of which will receive equal resources. The male-style school will have labs, contests, aggressive sports, and strict discipline from the teachers. Music class is all about using Apple Logic Pro 9. The female model school has group projects and mutual tutoring, positive reinforcement and self-esteem, yoga and dance classes, and — for music — a strings program. Violins, violas, and cellos are distributed....

55 comments:

It's interesting to me that almost 20% of our military recruits in Los Angeles are Asian, many of them Chinese educated here. I had one kid yesterday who is a structural engineer UCLA graduate. Lots of Koreans, as well. No Japanese.

Not all are men. Quite a few Chinese girls. I mean Chinese citizens, not just ethnic.

The Chinese people are at a tipping point. About 100,000,000 sincere Christian converts are making the Party very nervous. Among state approved churches, the Party has started to outlaw and remove Crosses from church buildings and tear down any church buildings deemed Too Big.

My point about the Christianity boom in China was that it probably is what is behind a return to God assigned gender roles as a strengthening move for the local society. The Oriental mind holds onto tightly to any good tradition that strengthens the family and gives the men and women a reason to live and enjoy life.

Marxism only gives men and women a reason destroy existing lives and to die themselves.( See, Obama, Barack)

There are assigned gender roles that derive from the biology of sustaining the species. Procreation, pregnancy, child bonding and nurturing and disparities in physical strength strongly influence roles, and have translated into cultural norms. Other innate differences between the sexes, to the extent they exist, are more subtle and their effect is harder to perceive, and thus debatable. We now have the affluence, technology and social organization to make perpetuation of the physically determined roles less necessary in many circumstances. We are just beginning to figure out what we gain and what we lose when we vary the roles, and it will take a long time to determine that. Even longer to be willing to acknowledge what we have learned and act on that knowledge. The societies that sort this out best will have a distinct advantage. We are in the middle of an evolutionary turmoil that may or may not result in big changes in the species. "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy ride."

Women have tried to be masculine boys. And in turn have made men be emasculated girls. Girls are not especially good at it, and neither are boys. Ladies, stop trying to cure the masculine out of boys. These will be the "men" who go on to date women. If women who arent' radical lesbian feminists, complain why men are such timid creatures, look to the social engineering that women have tried to force on boys.Boys are what they are taught. They are made to fell evil for having natural male impulses. Fuck off, you twats. Get your vagina out of mens brains.

Take any program that has been instituted since the 60's with the goal of developing kids into adults and building basic character, and tell me where Boy Scouts falls short. When done right, (by that I mean adults guide, not lead) there is no program I have ever run across that comes close to Boy Scouts.

Gender-segregated schools are the ideal solution and best suited to maximizing results.More, the path to good grades these days is a false one, and has different results for girls and boys, in that girls get better grades. But the instrument here, grades, is defective. Much more than any earlier grading system anywhere in the world, the US practice now is to heavily weight homework, projects and class work. Girls are naturally more disciplined about things of this sort, grinding out the undemanding daily chores. Boys grades fall behind largely because of missed homework. The old systems were based on tests, especially comprehensive examinations where knowledge and ability were challenged under stress. The real world as I have seen it is seems to indicate the latter sort of challenge is the more "real" filter for value. The grade gap is thus largely due to poor metrics. There are many fewer male teachers these days in the US partly because the profession is unwelcoming, teacher colleges being biased in small and large ways, because racial quotas favor minorities and those who qualify tend to be very heavily female- we are dealing with borderline conditions and the grade-gap is most extreme with black and Hispanic students feeding the schools of education; and to a degree, in that men are seen as risky due to increased risk of teacher misbehavior.

The Simpsons covered this in "Girls Just Want to Have Sums".Lisa poses as a boy and immediately gets nicknamed "Toilet".Excerpts:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLZfWKQdOQg (Math)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL0MuT0v6ds (Diversity)

But: ATTENTION boys who want to be artists - if you do shop in high school - welding, machining and go on to art school and do sculpture using wood or metal and thus welding, machining - then you can get a for eating-job in Wisconsin public schools now teaching shop even without an education degree

But: ATTENTION boys who want to be carpenters, welders - if you do shop and then go out to work and time passes till in your fifties your body needs to slow down then you can get a job in Wisconsin public schools now teaching shop even without an education degree or certification because of your experience.

And this change which means shop can still be taught in high schools was opposed by the Teachers Union who want the state to require an education certification costing $15,000 for every teacher including shop. For this reason shop was being discontinued in Wisconsin high schools because there were not enough teachers.

Another example of a public sneer-vice union working against the people and another example of how the insufferables can be defeated.

+1 to Madashell and iowan2 on the Boy Scouts. I was raised by a single Mom and my Grandmother. Another Eagle friend of mine, whose Dad passed before he was 5, and I were just discussing how messed up we would be without the male role models scouting provides. As a comparison, I had my first male teacher in eighth grade. We really do need more male elementary school teachers.

@ m stone.... The officially sanctioned Protestant Church is now estimated to be 5% of the population in China, or 67 million. The underground church is unknown because it is illegal. But something has The Party stirred up to the point that even the Sanctioned church is being repressed.

The new development seems to be 700 million Chinese are now hooked up internet users, that include 300 million smart phones, that can download Christian Teaching in Chinese. That teaching material is getting out now much faster than the old days of paper books could move it.

The first teaching material outreach on the block in China since about 1980 has been Derek Prince Ministries China run from Singapore by a wonderful British brother named Ross Patterson. Many Charismatic Christians have donated to that outreach regularly since the 1980s.

And here we we are clearing women for combat in the marines..interesting bit on the "unocumented" Chinese:"According to UNICEF, an estimated 290 million children under the age of 5 do not possess a birth certificate. As we know, proof of birth determines a child’s citizenship, nationality, place of birth, parentage and age, which are critical to ensuring children remain a part of society and do not fall victim to dangers such as exploitation. About 13 million Chinese adults lack household registration certificates because they were born in violation of the One-Child Policy. As for the families members caught violating the rule, they face heavy fines and even imprisonment for the men, or sterilization for the women. Not having this certificate means they can’t go to school, get a job, get married or do something as simple as check out library books. In the eyes of the state, these people don’t exist.'http://www.zmescience.com/other/feature-post/china-gender-imbalance-243423/

The female model school has group projects and mutual tutoring, positive reinforcement and self-esteem, yoga and dance classes, and — for music — a strings program. Violins, violas, and cellos are distributed...

I don't see how that would address the basic problem for girls, which in my experience is that many of them are graduating from high school with even knowing how to give a decent blowjob.

Oh, sure. That's why on the American frontier the fiddler were regarded as allies of the Devil because he composed the evil tunes they played on it, causing the men's hats to go up and the ladies pants to go down.

There is a theory, and I don't know enough to judge how valid it is, that people who speak tonal languages like Chinese do not lose their tone sense and are more likely to do well as a musician. The theory is that all babies are born with perfect pitch and lose it later if they do not use it in language.

"As for the families members caught violating the rule, they face heavy fines and even imprisonment for the men, or sterilization for the women."

Not if they are high status. One of my medical students was Chinese and educated in China where her mother was a professor at Beijing U. She had a brother and I asked her about the one child policy. Her reply was "Oh they aren't very smart." I suspect it had more to do with status although her father worked as an auto mechanic, even though he was educated as a physicist, but he was Christian.

Michael,I've been working on productions in both standard public and parochial charter schools lately. Much more even ratio of male to female teachers and admin. in the latter. I often think it would be good for teachers and parents and therefore students for there to be webcams in classrooms available to parents.Some of the instruction and behavior mod etc I've seen in both types of schools has been questionable in my view.

Ugh. I would have hated attending 'my' gender school in Gendertopia. I have a brother almost 5 years my senior and a sister a year and a half younger. By the time I started school I was capable of catching and throwing whatever object was tossed at me AND I could outfit a Barbie doll with the best of them - although I preferred kitting out my GI Joe.

No other option for schooling in Gendertopia for us obviously damaged sorts?

Those heathen Chinee are obviously way behind in their social development. We owe it to them to help them adopt more progressive attitudes towards gender. I suggest that we send them Lena Dunham. In fact, I'll start a collection to raise the air fare for her.

I thought there was something odd about GI Joe... he had too many accessories for one thing and his hands couldn't hold his weapons in a convincing manner. All thing considered GI Joe wasn't as much fun as the green plastic army men; after you got his boots on straight and got his M1 rigged with enough rubber bands to make his pose realistic it was time to play something else... (Although, "The Execution of GI Joachim the Nazi Infiltrator by Hanging" was amusing. Joe's articulated neck reacted convincingly to the drop.)

GI Joe was part of the structured play movement instigated by toy company executives with degrees in child psychology. I think the idea was to make play an unfulfilling experience, full of angst for the accessories you didn't have. The most fun was combining unrelated toys, such as green plastic army men vs yellow plastic Japs vs dinosaurs with late-afternoon intervention by the giant sentient Tonka dump truck.

"All thing considered GI Joe wasn't as much fun as the green plastic army men; after you got his boots on straight and got his M1 rigged with enough rubber bands to make his pose realistic it was time to play something else"

GI Joe was fun. Us kids used to play war with them in the garden and backyards, in teams of 4-5 kids @20-30 GI Joes. We had complex rules as to who could shoot at who and when, the effect of grenades, and we even had mortars and tanks with firing spring guns, and rules for those. The losing side generally finished in a final banzai charge when all was hopeless. For backyard warfare GI Joe was much easier to keep track of than green army men.

GI Joe warfare was an exercise in the development of complex legal systems through experience, precedent and negotiation. With the occasional black eye. Quite realistic.

We also had a military-industrial complex, devoted to hand-making toy artillery and tanks that Hasbro didnt provide, or if they did was most inadequate. With some ingenuity you could turn cardboard boxes and green housepaint into Shermans, Stuarts and halftracks.

I knew kids like you, buwaya,,, the fastidious types who grew up to be accountants and attorneys instead of engineers. No imagination. You'd be the kid who'd show up with his new GI Joe jeep, which looked stupid because Joe would have to be some kind of glandular freak to be that tall compared to a jeep. So whaddaya gonna do with that jeep? Drive off Dinosaur Island? Yeah, right. Look, we're stuck here. The Third Fleet's off with Halsey chasin' Ozawa so we ain't being rescued, got it?! Our only chance is to destroy the Jap's dino mind control unit, get the monsters to join us, and let the Tyrannosaur will eat the lousy Nip bastards instead of us. Now gimme a cigarette, the ones like look like tootsie rolls. Any questions? No, we ain't got mortars, buwaya, so shaddup! Besides, my Joe is invulnerable to grenades and mortars. Why?!? 'Cause it's my sandpile.

I didn't like "Combat" because SGT Saunders made the little guy carry the BAR when he had that hulk Little John available. And because they always when up against the stupid Germans (Idiotenabteilung) who charged out of cover and got mowed down.

I had molds for soldiers and made hundreds of lead soldiers, Then someone gave me a sack of aluminum pellets. I made a lot of aluminum soldiers although it took a charcoal fire to melt aluminum. The melting point is over 1200 degrees so charcoal gets hot !

I'm sure child protective service and the EPA would have raided my parents house today.

Of course boys need male teachers. For thousands of years, that's how they learned - if you went to school, teachers outside the home would be male, and if you didn't, you learned your trade/profession from your father (or were apprenticed to another man). In the past 100-150 years (in the West, anyway) we've completely upended this model; we shouldn't be the least bit surprised that boys are falling behind in school, as well as suffering from a host of other problems.

This year we moved our 7th grader to an all-boys' school with all male teachers. He has always been a bright but indifferent student, even with the best teachers (all women, of course - public school). This year his grades are off the charts, and when he's not talking about how much fun he and his friends had at one of their recesses during the day (there are 2, of course) he's telling us about Latin-this, math-that, science-the-other. He is joyful and respectful at the same time, and covered with dirt by the end of every day. I would love to see all boys given a chance to have this kind of education - I wish the public school system was paying more attention to what works.

Heh. The 80s GI Joe cartoon may help explain how we got here. The show was very combat oriented, but thanks to the moral guardians no one was allowed to die or, for that matter, get shot. It was rather amazing how often pilots would safely eject after their plane was hit, rather than perishing in a fireball and rain of scrap metal which would be the standard result. Come to think of it, pilots ejected from helicopters too and I'm not sure how that works without turning the pilot into nicely sliced chunks. There was an episode where GI Joe's aircraft carrier and Cobra's helicarrier (a carrier that flew in the air like a helicopter - it was that kind of show sometimes) ended up destroying each other and no one died. There was also the odd situation of jet aircraft often being shot down with small arm fire, but that is another story.

Now the comic book was something completely different. That ran up a serious body count.

My favorite male elementary-school teacher (now retired) is a former Army Ranger, who wanted to do something different when he retired.

The story is that one day in his Army career, his wife was complaining to a friend that "Bob never tells me anything about his work!"

"Janet", her friend replied, "his job is killing people!"

And yet, a kinder, gentler, more considerate teacher and mentor to those 5th-grade boys and girls could hardly be imagined. It's almost as if--bear with me now--people can adapt and rise to roles they are in.

Michael K, I'm in Texas, so you can't blame the teachers' unions for what's wrong with our schools. Maybe you can say the school districts are run by the same kind of self-interested people who usually run the unions, and are running the district for the adults' benefit and not for the children's - that might be what's going on, depending on the district you're in. I'm in a very urban district, so I can see that being part of the problem.

Our district does have one all-boys' school and one all-girls' school; based on their test scores they are doing well. But small magnets like that don't have sports. Actually, none of our district middle schools get money for sports - uniforms and such get paid for with parent fundraising. In a new, small school, that's hard to get going. To me, not having sports greatly limits the experience the boys can have.